Nigger (the word): a brief history!

By AM Monday, June 30, 2014

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Mick Hall with a piece examining the history of the word 'nigger.' It featured in Organized Rage on 19 June 2o14.


Only a moron or a deceitful exploiter would be against health and safety, human rights and what the looney right called political correctness.


To set the piece below in context I wrote it after reading comments left on a blog I regularly visit. This site is far from reactionary and most of the regular commentators are sound, but I hit my keyboard when one left a comment:

"Why can't you say 'nigger anymore?"

Nigger (the word) a brief history!

The word, nigger, carries with it much of the hatred and disgust directed toward Black Africans and African Americans. Historically, nigger defined, limited, made fun of, and ridiculed all Blacks.

It was a term of exclusion, a verbal reason for discrimination. Whether used as a noun, verb, or adjective, it strengthened the stereotype of the lazy, stupid, dirty, worthless nobody. No other word carries as much purposeful cruelty.
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One in a series of posters attacking black suffrage. Stigmatising people has been around along time

 No matter what its origins, by the early 1800s, it was firmly established as a derogative name. In the 21st century, it remains a principal term of hate, white racism and supremacy, regardless of who is using it.

Today to use this word is racist and those who use it are either racist or are being deliberately provocative, which in many ways is far worse. For millionaire rappers or anyone else to attempt to bring this word back into use, just shows how far in hoch they are to the man in the big house and how little the sacrifices made by previous generations of black activists means to them. It's the language of the exploiter and no matter how much wealth a black entertainer might have, or claims of fooling around, it can never make it not so.

I well remember when I was first called a kike, I had absolutely no understanding of what it meant, but I instinctively knew the boy who said it was putting me down, and when I went home from school and asked my mother I knew it for sure. Although even then I just could not put my finger on why the boy would have used it. After all, I thought he was my mate. I now know he used it because he thought it was the right thing to do, socially acceptable, he'd heard his parents using such language so it must be OK and so the cancer grows.

Words like Paki, nigger, kike, spic, raghead, hedge-moper, wetback, etc, are derogatory terms used by past and present oppressors to insult us and encourage us to differentiate ourselves from each other, leaving them alone to exploit us at will.

In the early 1990s, the term political correctness was adopted by US conservatives and neo liberals as a pejorative term to attack those who were attempting to introduce new terms that sought to leave behind discriminatory labels which still played a part in the exploitation of sections of society, whether they were black, disabled, gay, whatever. They also saw it as a useful tool to win over people who fear change.

Thus billionaires like the Koch brothers and Rupert Murdoch were to the fore in this campaign whether by donating large sums of money or in the case of Murdoch allowing his media outlets to publicize this part of their reactionary strategy.

Fortunately times had changed and the reactionary right failed to gain traction with this campaign, so they attempted to turn what they call political correctness into a joke. Most folk ignored their crap believing it was time to move on and recognising the use of derogatory terms like nigger, Kike, wetback, queer, etc, was not the type of world they wish to live in let alone bring their children up in. Thus today they no longer use these discriminatory terms because they have concluded using them is plain wrong.

However reaction never sleeps and after the 2008 banking crisis they saw an opportunity to shift the blame off their own shoulders where it undoubtedly belonged, onto those of some of the most marginalised and powerless people in the land, the underclass, immigrants, asylum seekers, the sick and disabled, drug addicts, and the unemployed, not one of whom played any part in creating the recession.

Health and Safety

 

It never ceases to amazes me when otherwise ordinary decent people, blame the worlds ills on political correctness, health and safety, human rights legislation and that old chestnut multiculturalism.

Why when surly with a smidgen of thought it is pretty obvious to even the most hard headed fool that health and safety has been one of the most beneficial pieces of legislation ever to be placed on the statute book. By passing it into law the State became responsible for ensuring employers had to provide their workers with a safe working environment. How is that so terrible? Maybe some fool bureaucrat might overstep the mark now and again, but before you condemn health and safety take a look at the working conditions in countries which have few if any health and safety laws.

Only last year a Garment factory collapses in Dhaka, killing more than 1,000 workers because it was constructed with substandard materials and the employers locked fire exit doors. When I first left school and worked in a board mill I noticed some of the older workers had been placed on light duties because they had lost limbs in industrial accidents, before adequate health and safety laws were introduced. When there was no real onus on the employer to provide shields on guillotines, or make safe the entrances to the pulp beaters which made them deadly. Men who had accidentally fallen into these beaters literally disappeared from the face of the earth. Only last month in the Turkish coal mining disaster we saw what happens when employers and government collude in ignoring health and safety.

When the rich encourage folk to rail against health and safety it is like all they do, for their benefit alone. They want the right to exploit at will and health and safety legislation helps stop them doing that.

In the public sphere they have campaigned against the wearing of seat belts, stopping smoking in public places, and countless other laws which have made our lives better. Where they still exist, ask any workplace health and safety rep and they will tell you employers are perpetually looking for ways to cut corners. Legislation and ever vigilance is the only way to ensure workers return home safe to their families after a days work.

Human Rights

Human rights legislation does not always protect us from government abuse, especially if the government in question is the UK or USA. The latter as far as I am aware has not even affiliated to the court in the Hague. The European Court of Human Rights, which incidentally is independent  of the EU, while far from perfect it does give victims an avenue in which they can pursue their case when all else has failed.

If for example the UK withdraws from the ECHR, would that make the human rights of British citizens any more secure? Given the British governments centuries of abusing peoples human rights at home and abroad I doubt it very much. When a government with that type of track record calls for withdrawal it's our own human rights they have in their gunsight. We ignore this at our own peril.

Reactions main bullet points

One only has to see the forces of reactions current wish list to understand who is behind this drive to remove these laws.

In the UK it is the Tory Party, Orange Book Lib-Dems like Nick Clegg, UKiP and the Blairites, in other words the political representatives of the ruling classes. Amongst their main bullet points are:

• The scrapping of working time regulations and, all data protection laws. (Remind me how long did workers struggle for a 40 hour week and an 8 hour day?)
• Less regulation of the financial services industry - including deregulation of the mortgage industry. (It's as if the Banking crash of 2008 never occurred)
• Less Health & Safety 'burdens' on care homes in order to increase the number of places for elderly and disabled people. (Note how they use language; they are doing this to benefit the old folk, H@S which protects people becomes a 'burden,' there they have said it, but a burden on who? Money grabby greedy exploiters? They claim if it is abolished they will increase the number of places for your dear old mum. No mention people will be squeezed in six to a room, etc in the interest of ever more profit.) 
• Easing of regulations that govern how firms make employees redundant. (This one is a peach, if the working time regulations are abolished they can make workers redundant by increasing the hours of those who are left and as an added bonus the sacked workers can go whistle)
• Britain should opt out of the EU directive on food supplements. (At a time when more and more of us distrust the food we eat, they wish to stop the consumers making an informed choice, who benefits is always the question to ask).

If implemented in full this deregulation package would, 'it's claimed,' save British business approximately £14bn and who would pick up the tab? Wages and working conditions would be decimated; and we think they are bad enough now?

Multiculturalism

Finally we get to that old stalking horse multiculturalism, which when you take away the academic froth is simply a reflection of the world we live in. In case someone has missed it, the worlds population is multicultural and multiracial, always has been. The difference today is the masses ability to travel at low cost across continents and oceans. The only way you will stop immigration is to have closed borders or raise the living standards in the third world to comparable levels. We in the west demand the right to travel wherever we wish but when others take the same path many of us express shock and horror.

We cannot have it both ways. If we are to debate this subject we need to do it as civilised people, and not allow the ruling class to set our agenda, understand why people leave their homes for pastures new, dump our prejudices and dopey beliefs that folk come to our homeland to sign on. One minute we are claiming they are stealing our welfare benefits and abusing our health-care system, and the next we claim they are stealing our jobs. Either they are too lazy or ill to work or they are taking our jobs.  

We cannot have it both ways so what is it? If it is the latter we need laws to stop such exploitation because the employers are clearly underpaying them. Alongside this we need to ensure all workers apply for jobs on a level playing field. Mass immigration into western Europe was used as a tool by the neoliberal political creatures of capital to to drive workers wages down. Lets blame them, not men and women whose only crime is trying to make a better life for them and there's.

As an American President once said:

So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is ... fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyses needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.